7/9 Open Thread

After World War II, the US and UK got together to design a global economic system to prevent the very mistakes that caused that catastrophe. Today we have just a superficial understanding of political economy: we think in binary terms of either “hate” or “economic anxiety”. Then, figures like the great JM Keynes had a more nuanced understanding of political economy. They knew that stagnant economies are like amplifiers of a society’s latent rage — that poverty feeds hate with anger. And so the point of the system that Keynes hoped to design was to prevent imbalances between nations — that is, one nation owing too much to another, thus causing onerous debt repayments, which are essentially what drove the German economy into the ground, and led to world war and holocaust.

To prevent all that, Keynes — along with the equally brilliant founder of Buddhist Economics (yes, really), EF Schumacher — proposed something really radical, revolutionary, beautiful, transformative. History’s first ultranational currency, Bancor. Bancor wasn’t a currency that you or I could hold: only governments could hold it, only gold could be exchanged for it, only the IMF could lend and settle it, and — here’s the key — opposite to your personal bank account, if you held too much, you’d be charged interest — making the rational thing for you to do to invest your surplus of it. The Bancor system would balance itself — and an era of peace would dawn.

It was the single most brilliant institutional design probably in human history. Can you guess what happened next?

There was only one hitch. America. Because America was the stronger party in the post-war negotiations, Bancor never came to be. Why did America object to Bancor?

The Twitterverse is of course already exploding, with McResistance Maddow muppets pounding out furious responses to Trump with heavy fingers and countless hysterical corporate media articles being written as I type the end of this sentence. A new article by the CIA-fundedWashington Post is being frantically circulated about Russian hackers having infiltrated America’s energy companies with no skepticism whatsoever, despite WaPo’s having leveled a very similar accusation about Russian hackers infiltrating America’s power grid a few short months ago which was proven to have been 100 percent false from top to bottom. These horrible omnicidal maniacs have somehow taken a ceasefire in Syria and an improvement in relations between two nuclear superpowers and twisted that into being a bad thing. This is unacceptable, inexcusable, and damn near unforgivable. These people are literally traitors to their species.

The international elite are divided. This should scare us, as such divisions can plunge the world into violence and disorder. But the situation is not hopeless…

This G20 will pitch the “strongmen” against the “moderates”—Merkel, Macron, Trudeau. The latter might look nicer, talk nicer and act nicer. Merkel has put climate change, migration and free trade on the agenda, much to the chagrin of Trump.

We shouldn’t be fooled. The G20 agenda utterly fails to break with the tired, broken policies of the free market. In other words, those very policies which, by increasing inequality and devastating communities, turning everyone into a self-interested individual, have unwittingly given rise to the likes of Trump. And that’s to ignore the “Trumpism” in European politics—the barbaric immigration policy at Europe’s borders through which thousands of desperate migrants die in the Mediterranean every year.

Sure, Merkel wants cooperation on climate change and thinks globalisation should work for the many, not the few. Who can disagree? But what does that really mean? A desperate attempt to restore the system that was destroyed on the day Lehman Brothers collapsed.

The G20 agenda talks about the need for structural reforms to reduce debt. Like those deeply anti-social policies the European Union has imposed on Greece for the last eight years, which have devastated that country and its people? …

What does this look like? The G20 fear a healthcare crisis as antibiotics stop working. So scrap intellectual property rights for drugs companies, and use public funding to insist on public priorities in medical research, and access for all. Climate change? Urgently reduce carbon emissions and put massive funding into helping developing countries develop free of fossil fuels. Terrorism? The simplest of all. The G20 are the biggest backers of terrorism in the world. Stop it, and put real effort into creating a world order based on peace and cooperation in a properly funded and functional UN.

With the ceasefire in tatters, Kerry publicly complained on Sept. 29, 2016: “Syria is as complicated as anything I’ve ever seen in public life, in the sense that there are probably about six wars or so going on at the same time – Kurd against Kurd, Kurd against Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sunni, Shia, everybody against ISIL, people against Assad, Nusra [Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate]. This is as mixed-up sectarian and civil war and strategic and proxies, so it’s very, very difficult to be able to align forces.”

Admitting Deep-State Pre-eminence

Only in December 2016, in an interview with Matt Viser of the Boston Globe, did Kerry admit that his efforts to deal with the Russians had been thwarted by then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter – as well as all those forces he found so difficult to align.

“Unfortunately we had divisions within our own ranks that made the implementation [of the ceasefire agreement] extremely hard to accomplish,” Kerry said. “But it … could have worked. … The fact is we had an agreement with Russia … a joint cooperative effort.

“Now we had people in our government who were bitterly opposed to doing that,” he said. “I regret that. I think that was a mistake. I think you’d have a different situation there conceivably now if we’d been able to do that.”

The Globe’s Viser described Kerry as frustrated. Indeed, it was a tough way for Kerry to end nearly 34 years in public office.

After Friday’s discussions with President Trump, Kremlin eyes will be focused on Secretary of State Tillerson, watching to see if he has better luck than Kerry did in getting Ashton Carter’s successor, James “Mad Dog” Mattis and CIA’s latest captive-director Pompeo into line behind what President Trump wants to do.

But this week, McKinsey-UPenn study focused only on ACA plan areas that included hospitals with top-tier oncologists and showed how they are very much underrepresented in narrow networks. From Bloomberg:

For the study, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed data on 23,442 oncologists in the U.S., evaluating how often doctors affiliated with National Cancer Institute-designated centers were covered by lower-cost insurance plans. The University of Pennsylvania is an NCI-designated cancer center.

Oncologists working at the U.S.’s 69 NCI facilities in the U.S., which offer access to scientific research and are known for their handling of complex cases, were twice as likely to be excluded from plans with the narrowest networks, according to the study.

“Most common cancers can be treated well anywhere,” said Justin Bekelman, associate professor of radiation oncology, medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the researchers. “But there are many patients with rare or uncommon tumors who need access to the most advanced clinical trials, and that access is often only at these NCI cancer centers. On the individual market, when people are spending their own hard-earned dollars, they can chose to have access or not. But right now they are choosing in a blind way.”….

The Penn researchers analyzed 248 insurance networks across the U.S. operating in areas with NCI-designated centers. They found that one in every three significantly limited the number of oncologists in their insurance plans. Of all the cancer doctors who were part of those narrow networks, 17 percent worked at NCI centers. Of all the doctors who were excluded from those plans, 35 percent participated at NCI centers.

He said that within hours of “soft-launching” his campaign, he had already heard from thousands of people across the country who want to donate or volunteer. “There’s a lot of anger out there in my party against Bernie,” Svitavsky said.

The argument of the Hellevig report is that the US and NATO campaign against Russia has failed to do the damage it was aimed to do, and that their propaganda outlets, media and think-tanks are lying to conceal the failure. Small percentage numbers for the decline in Russian GDP and related measures are summed up by Hellevig as “belt-tightening, not much more”. Logically and arithmetically, similarly small numbers in the measurement of the Russian recovery this year ought to mean “belt expanding, not much more.” But like Nietzsche, Hellevig is more optimistic.

In an interview Sunday with Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Haley said Trump’s meeting Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin was an important step because “things start to move” once Trump meets with another leader.

“What he did was bring up right away the election meddling, and he did that for a reason,” Haley said, referring to Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. “One, he wanted … to basically look him in the eye, let him know that: ‘Yes, we know you meddled in our elections. Yes, we know you did it, and cut it out.’